Write my way out : the power of words against erasure in Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Julia Alvarez's How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

Abstract

Since the days of the conquistadors, erasure has been an inherent facet of Dominican identities. Similarly, the pressures of immigrants to blend into United States culture and stifle their "otherness" only added to the silencing of Dominican-American identities when many were forced to flee the island nation under the despotic rule of Rafael Trujillo in the mid-twentieth century. In their novels, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, Junot Díaz and Julia Alvarez, respectively, explore the important roles that language has in both the stifling of identity and the overcoming of generations worth of forced silence. In this thesis, I explore how each author explores the importance of storytelling in reestablishing the presence of Dominican identities. Alvarez's García Girls is told from a firstgeneration immigrant perspective and struggles to understand how two languages and national identities can coexist peacefully within a singular host. Her main character, Yolanda, faces pressures to conform from both external and internal sources. A generation removed, Díaz's Oscar is not so much struggling to balance two opposing identities, but is instead trying to establish an identity amidst a generations-long legacy of violence and silenced voices. Just as Díaz's characters benefit from and improve on the the efforts of the previous generation, so too does Díaz benefit from the efforts of authors like García. Novels like García Girls crafted a space in the American literary canon for later generations of authors to build upon. Both authors structure their novels in order to enhance the reader's understanding of the obstacles that stand in the way of Dominican-Americans carving out a place for themselves. In García Girls, this is achieved through a reverse-chronological structure. Díaz takes the non-chronological structure a step further by vacillating between past and present. While the novels differ in terms of structure and theme, each emphasizes the same idea: the only way to understand the present is to understand the past.